[EM] democratic community, the web, implicit/explicit instant proxy

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:42 PM 8/27/2006, Brian Olson wrote:
>I want a solution which is much like an instant proxy system. I guess this
>puts me more in Abdul-Rahman Lomax's camp. The idea of setting up explicit
>little affinity groups or constituencies sounds awkward and baroque to me,
>and I don't think people would actually be involved enough to want to
>maintain such a structure.

Actually, we already have something like it. It is called society. 
However, the "affinity groups" are, far too often, far too informal 
to have the kind of impact that formal organization could accomplish.

DP creates what have been called "natural caucuses," being the set of 
constituents of a proxy plus the proxy himself or herself. However, 
any mailing list going to a subset of members of an FA/DP 
organization is likewise a kind of caucus or affinity group. Such 
lists abound already, just not within an overarching DP structure 
that makes the discovery of consensus on a large scale possible.

Small groups can find consensus relatively easily, if they value it. 
Most Town Meeting Town politics is the politics of consensus, because 
the scale is small and people do, after all, have to continue living 
with each other. In certain self-help groups consensus can be greatly 
valued, and substantial effort will be put into it. I remember one 
issue which started out with the group highly polarized, with a 
number of members reacting to a requested change with, more or less, 
"over my dead body." The secretary of that meeting, quite wisely, 
suggested that the decision be postponed to a meeting where 
discussion would be scheduled. And at that meeting, after thorough 
discussion, but before a final vote, a poll was taken. It was 
essentially an Approval Poll. If we'd thought of Range, we might have 
used it. The poll showed how the members of the group, individually, 
thought of the issue, after having heard the arguments. From the 
Poll, there was an obvious motion to make the change, and it was 
entered. And it passed *unanimously*.

Deep polarization can disappear if people have the opportunity to 
work through the issues. Our present political systems, instead of 
providing the opportunity, all too often *encourage* the 
polarization, because ... well, I think most of our readers know why. 
It gets people fired up, and they will vote for you and work for you 
if you are the flag-bearer of this crusade....

>I should probably re-read Lomax's formal definition of Delegable Proxy
>(DP) but my email isn't searchable at the moment. Based on the current
>discussion it sounds like I want something a lot like that, but extended
>to make it more automatic and even lower effort for a casual web community
>member.

DP is about as low effort as I could imagine. Indeed, one of our 
slogans is, "Lift a finger, change the world."

But about delegable proxy as I'd define it, the topic has passed into 
a group project, and it never was up to me alone anyway, since there 
have been multiple independent inventions. The material on
http://beyondpolitics.org and
http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki

is not the latest thinking, necessarily, the latest thinking is 
appearing on various lists, a newsgroup, and in private mail. 
Hopefully, someone will start to collect this material as well as to 
point to other relevant links. Searching for "delegable proxy" will 
pull up a lot of my writing, yes, but also that of others. There is 
apparently a software project or projects under discussion at the 
googlegroup top-politics.
>http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics

But I don't see delegable proxy as a software problem. DP is a method 
of creating a communications network, including filtering, from the 
bottom rather than by the more traditional central or top-down 
planning. Writing software to implement it is to some degree, central 
planning. Not wrong, per se, but I'd rather see DP groups decide what 
they need before determining the exact details of the rules.

>The extension is to extract a fuzzy "implicit proxy" from users actions.
>Instead of having to remember someone out of the myriad of possibly
>bizarre user names, you go about your regular process of reading and
>moderating. Many sites allow any registered user to vote for or against
>any comment or user posted story. This would be recorded and if the system
>determines that you're regularly positively rating some user or users they
>would to some degree become your proxy. Given fuzzy, implicit
>probabilistic methods, it is appropriate to give an implicit proxy only
>part of their presumed constituent's vote. A non voter's vote might even
>be distributed fractionally over several of their possible proxies.

Certainly this is doable. We might call it "fuzzy proxy," not a bad 
name. Could be quite useful. But DP involves explicit choice of proxy 
by the client, and, as I'd suggest, explicit acceptance by the proxy. 
A *relationship*, a personal one, is created. The personal 
communication which would be expected to ensue, from time to time, is 
a crucial part of the concept. Software might facilitate this in some 
way, but we are basically talking about human action and interaction.

>Setting an explicit proxy should also be allowed. It could override or be
>just some spots on your proxy list along with the implicit proxies. It
>might be worthwhile to be able to set your explicit proxies to start to
>decay after some number of months if you forget to update them. The system
>might be able to extract better, more current representatives for you.

Of course, a system could suggest proxies, particularly to newcomers. 
But one must recognize the danger in this!

I regret not having the time to continue to discuss Mr. Olson's post. 
Perhaps I will be able to return to it....